


Sleeping Arrangements

by CopperCaravan



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fera Shepard, Friends to Lovers, I honestly don't even know how to tag this monster at this point, I just want you all to know this was only supposed to be 3 pages long, Identity Issues, Misunderstandings, Moderate amount of Jeff Moreau, Wrex Ships It, a light sprinkling of PTS, also starring: the obligatory jokes about the mako and the fish, and there is no smut I am incapable I'm sorry, some tropey goodness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-22 22:30:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6096037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Set over the course of ME 2 with the game's plot as an undercurrent.) Shepard's not coping well with waking up as a "Cerberus Cyborg," nor is she coping particularly well with having died in the first place. Garrus is trying to figure out where "Archangel" ends and "Garrus" begins again. The two of them need to get reacquainted--they were friends, after all, before all this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Most Important Thing: Blargha was my (patient and wonderful) beta-reader for this. That's who deserves all the credit, honestly, because the amount of typos that were in this thing were just shameful.  
> I don't know how this happened. It was a reunion scene. That was it. It was a three-page reunion scene and yet here we are. Couple things:  
> Most crew members make appearances. Shepard gets on well with some of them and she doesn't get on well with others. There's no character hate, and most of the other characters only show up in passing, but be prepared: she doesn't throw daisies at all of them.  
> As usual, I didn't use my Shep's first name, but there are nods to her backstory (Colonist/War Hero/Mostly Paragon, etc) so it's pretty obvious she's an OC; sorry if that bugs you, but I mean, there it is, so...  
> Be aware of plenty of explicit language to follow, and nods to panic attacks, some minor PTSD, that sort of thing.

“Shepard.”

That’s it. That’s all it took.

Middle of a fire fight. The entirety of three pissed off merc. companies closing in on them. She’s unrecognizable with Cerberus not just on her left and right but on her armour too, and her face covered ear to ear in cybernetics scars that make her feel anything but “Shepard.”

God, she’d have been glad to see those blue clan markings anyway but _Shepard,_ he’d said.

Her name, like it was really hers—it was the closest she’s felt to herself since she woke up in that fucking lab, tubes and wires poking out of her like the robot they’ve built her into. The closest she’s felt to herself since she got onboard the SR-2, a New Normandy flying yellow and white and if it hadn’t been for Joker, she’d have died again before she boarded at all. The closest she’s felt to herself since hearing Miranda say things like “rebuilt,” and “control chip,” and “field test.”

It had all come down to Garrus Vakarian looking her in the eye and saying “Shepard” as though he was so certain of the woman before him. After so much and so long, it was like having a home to come back to again.

But Garrus... She’d known right off that something was wrong—seems like something’s been wrong with everything—but that hadn’t been the time or place to bring it up. Of course, there’s no guarantee he’d want to talk to her anyway, not with—well, she wouldn’t blame him any suspicion given the circumstances but the truth is she can hardly bear the thought and maybe that’s why she’s been avoiding him since he came on board.

No chance for rejection that way. No time for “didn’t you die?” No fear of the uncertainty resting in her gut when someone—when Garrus—asks her “Are you really Shepard?”

Every time she looks in the mirror, she traces those scars with her finger and that’s all she can think. _Are you really Shepard?_

She doesn’t know. She knows what she _wants._ But you don’t just die—you don’t just float around dead in space and then get slapped on a table and come back two years and twelve days later with a hell of a hangover. Hundreds of people, thousands of people—hell, the universe is pretty damn old, _millions and billions of people._ People who have died and people who shouldn’t have and _Shepard’s_ the one that comes back? It’s just not how shit works.

And she can’t—she can’t, she can’t, she _can’t_ hear Garrus say that. She can’t see her best friend look her in the eye again and take it back. Doesn’t even know if he _is_ still her best friend. Two years. Two goddamn _years._

And if that fucking glass ceiling above her bed wasn’t the scariest thing she’s ever seen, she’d fire off a few rounds right into the damn thing just to have something to fight. It’d be better than having panic attacks in her closet. Better than EDI asking if she should notify Doc and Shepard trying to catch her breath just to say no. 

 _Fuck_ but something’s wrong. “On my own,” he’d said.

He hadn’t been alone when she’d—when she’d left. He hadn’t been sitting in a tunnel getting shot at either. He hadn’t been so... worn down. Injuries aside, Doc had certainly had plenty to report: too many stims, not enough sleep, dehydrated, exhausted, mentally and physically over-worked, clearly been exposed to Red Sand, and “Shepard, he doesn’t even remember the last time he ate a vegetable! Now, I know I’m not his mother but good god.”

And fuck it all, she can’t even get herself together enough to ask. Some Commander she is these days. Some fucking friend. _Congratulations, Cerberus, you’ve got yourself a broken doll._

“Dammit!” She throws a punch at her bathroom door and _fuck_ that was stupid. Her hand hurts and it serves her right, but what matters isn’t that she’ll be nursing a bruise; it’s just more glowing, orange cuts. Something even sparks and _god,_ she’s just so tired.

“All clear, EDI?”

“Yes, Shepard.”

She nods and yanks the blanket and pillow off the foot of her bed, flings them over her shoulder and steps into the elevator.

As if rest is actually rest these days.

\--- --- ---

Garrus knocks again.

It’s late, but the lock light on her door is green, so perhaps she’s still up. Weary, like him. But awake anyway, like him. Seems the pain meds Doc gave him just aren’t quite doing it. Or maybe he’s just restless—a lot’s happened lately.

“Shepard?” he calls. She’d always kept her door unlocked before, but it’s been so long... “It’s me. Can I come in?”

But she doesn’t answer. Again.

His temper flares up a bit, he can’t help it. He—well, he misses her, dammit. And he’s hardly seen her at all since he woke up, just glimpses of her passing by in the mess or on her way to the cockpit. She hasn’t even come into the battery at all and she used to hang out with him in the Cargo Bay all the time.

 _Archangel_ flashes across his mind and he can’t help but shrink away from knocking on her door again. _Maybe she_ —

“Officer Vakarian.” The voice comes from nowhere, comes from everywhere. EDI is going to take some time to get used to. Just like everything else about this New Normandy, it seems.

“You, ah, you can just call me Garrus, EDI. I’m not a C-Sec officer anymore,” he says. He doesn’t know where to look when he speaks to her—it?—so he looks at the ceiling.

“Understood. Commander Shepard is not in her cabin.”

“Oh. Well, where is she?”

“She is in the lower engineering deck, under the stairwell.”

“Under the—” Shepard knows the Normandy—or at least, she’d known the old Normandy. Known it inside out, backwards, forwards, every single crevice, every piece of metal, every bolt, every screw. _Grew up on a farm,_ she’d told him once. _Fixing tractors and things._ But despite her knack for mechanics, she’d always said it was better for everyone if she left the ship in the care of her engineers. Drive cores weren’t her thing, she said. But he’d learned quickly that there was more to it than that. Even having her anywhere near the Mako had grown to make him nervous, and not just because of her driving. She seemed to radiate some strange aura that caused things to fall apart—she could fix things, sure, but tools got lost, screws came loose, pieces got stuck between the gridlines of the metal floor (not to mention all the times he’d hit his head on the undercarriage, although that was less about her “aura” and more about her telling bad jokes while he was working). “What is she doing down there?”

“She is sleeping.”

...

 _Sleeping,_ he thinks. _Under a staircase._

And she is. He’s never seen her like this.

Once, he thought he’d seen her vulnerable, seen a moment of her “human side,” as Alenko’d called it. She’d come down the night before they’d hit Ilos. She’d dealt them all cards, brought them all beers, lost a bunch of money to every single one of them. They’d all had a good time—as good a time as can be had when you think you’re going to die. And much later, after Wrex had fallen asleep in a drunken huddle and the others had gone back upstairs, she’d stopped by Ashley’s station and run her fingers across the assortment of datapads and unfinished gun mods and unread letters. And Garrus had realized she wasn’t anywhere near the drunk she had been pretending to be.

She turned around to leave and saw him watching her and it took her one second too long to put the Commander mask back on. She’d broken character, and it was too late to hide it. She squeezed his hand, whispered, and went to the elevator without looking back at him. “Not gonna lose anybody else tomorrow,” she’d said. And he didn’t know if she was trying to comfort him or herself.

Never before and never since did he see any weakness, any uncertainty, any hesitation in her. It was almost—well, the Turian military would love her for the strength of the façade she  could put up. ( _Hate her for other things though_ , he’d always thought. Things he loved her for—dirty jokes and little gestures, breaking rules and ignoring orders, mercy when he didn’t expect it. Things like that.)

But now he sees her huddled under a staircase, curled up like a child, nesting in a blanket between piles of boxes and spare parts and broken salvage and he realizes that _this_ is vulnerability. _This_ is Shepard. And he doesn’t know what to do.

...

He hadn’t woken her; uncertainty had held him back. But now, sitting across from her at the mess table, he wishes he had. _“Shepard, what are you doing down here?”_ on the engineering deck is much less awkward than starting breakfast with _“Hey Shepard, I can’t help but notice how you keep kneading your neck; that because I didn’t wake you up while you were sleeping under the stairs?”_

She hangs her head low over her mug and he sees the slight flare of her nostrils as she inhales the steam. He wants to say something— _she’s right there, I can just ask_ —but he doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. They’re surrounded by the rest of her crew. It’s always a bad idea to talk to her before she’s finished her tea. And his face hurts. There’s that too. On the long list of things that are distracting him on this new Normandy, rocket-induced face pain is pretty high up. Almost tied with... but well, grief and bottomless anger don’t really have much place at the breakfast table.

He doesn’t realize just how intently he’s staring at her until she looks up and sees him. And for just a second, he keeps looking. Because something’s wrong. Her  hair’s the same—a little shorter, but still brown and curling over her shoulders, bunched up in a lazy attempt at soldier’s dress. Her eyes, too, are the same—sharp and green and practically gravitational when she locks onto his gaze. It’s the bruised coloration underneath them that’s new, the way her skin seems paler and her face a bit thinner. She just looks so worn down. All that, in just a second, but it’s a second too long. Her eyes widen and she looks away and her hand leaves her cup to cover her cheek, and that’s it—she’s up and walking toward the elevator, one hand rubbing self-consciously around the back of her neck and the other holding her mug. “EDI, tell Joker I’ll be in the cockpit in twenty minutes.”

“Yes Shepard.”

And she’s gone.

\--- --- ---

“Shepard, Doctor Chakwas has requested that I remind you not to pick at your scars.”

Shepard closes her eyes and leans forward, resting her forehead against the cool glass of her bathroom mirror and dropping her hands from her face. As if being dead for two years wasn’t bad enough. As if being tailed by Cerberus operatives calling themselves her teammates wasn’t bad enough. As if being a fucking Cerberus Cyborg wasn’t bad enough. Now Cerberus has her own damn ship spying on her and bossing her around. (And no, it doesn’t matter that Doc’s the one who asked EDI to do it; it matters that Cerberus installed an Intelligence on the Normandy. The New Normandy. Whatever. It’s not about EDI. Exactly. God, this shit gives her a headache.)

She straightens back up and leaves the bathroom. She needs to get to the Bridge. She needs to... to do things and say things and deal with all the shit that’s piled up while she was... gone.

The sweats aren’t enough though. The cybernetics fucking _glow_ through most of her clothes and her face—well, what the hell’s she even supposed to do about that? Don a ski mask? In space? She pulls her shirt over her head and flings it toward the corner, then she just stands there, staring at her Cerberus-issued wardrobe and wishing she at least had a headscarf. Something. _Anything_ to keep people from staring at her. God, the way Garrus had looked at her over breakfast— _fuck._

“Shepard, if I may—”

Shepard throws her undershirt at the ceiling. “Goddammit, EDI, can’t I even have some privacy to get dressed?”

“I apologize, Shepard.”

“Don’t,” she says quickly. She’s not sure how she feels about all this—about EDI, about feeling guilty for talking to her—it—whatever—about talking to EDI that way. “You’re just doing your job. I’m just—I’m just a little stressed, EDI; that’s all.”

“That is understandable. I simply wished to inform you that Doctor Chakwas left a box of clothing that you may find more to your liking. She left it by the door this morning.”

Shepard glances to the left and sees it there—come to think of it, she’s pretty sure she saw it this morning and ignored it, much like she tends to ignore everything before she’s had some tea.

She digs a turtleneck—one of several—out of the box and slides it over her torso. The fabric is thick enough to cover most of the cybernetic lights. A bit hot, but she’ll get over that with a grin on her face. “Where’d Doc get these, anyway?”

“She bought them yesterday, at the Omega Market.”

At that, Shepard actually snorts. “The Good Doctor, shopping for shirts on the most criminally-dense rock we could find.”

With the scars on her stomach and arms almost wholly concealed, she rolls the neck of the shirt up as far as she can and smoothes her hair around her face to cover as much of her cheeks as possible. Most of her face—her forehead in particular—is a lost cause but it’s something. And this doesn’t even have a Cerberus logo on it; she can’t stop the smug grin. Wouldn’t if she could.

She heads toward the door, knowing that she’s going to start sweating even from the elevator to the cockpit, but it’ll be worth it. She... she doesn’t think she can manage it, honestly: telling Doc thanks for... for this. For knowing. For not making her ask. She should do it—she ought to woman up and march down to the Med Bay right now, but she... Instead, she asks EDI to send along her thanks.

“And EDI... you too. Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Shepard.”

\--- --- ---

Doc had tried her damnedest—and Chakwas was always more commanding than people gave her credit for—to convince Garrus to take it easy on runs for a while. Garrus, predictably, had been a hard sell. He’s ready to get back out there, to do something to keep himself busy.

By the time Shepard calls the ground team in for a debrief, he’s already been to the Cargo Bay, cleaned his armour, and had some coffee (then another cup, after the awkwardness at breakfast). Briefing Room’s a bit different—more light, big table, specifically human-friendly chairs—but Shepard, at least, seems to be right in her element, laying out priorities, going over details, giving a little pep-talk. Nice to have some semblance of _normal_.

He shifts in his (uncomfortable) seat and just takes a breath, preparing himself to be back out in the thick of things. The rational part of him knows Doc’s probably right—with everything that’s happened, he should probably take a few more days, but he just can’t stand sitting around, doing nothing. He gets so antsy these days. And Shepard’s back. There’s nothing quite like fighting the fight at Shepard’s side and he’s still got a score to settle with Omega; he’s not sure if he’ll ever land even with this place, honestly, but scouring these streets with someone he can trust—he needs that again.

But then she says something that doesn’t make sense. His mouth pops open and he thumps his fingers against his thigh. _That can’t be right,_ he thinks, staying in his seat as the others begin to file out.

“Garrus, you hear me?”

“You’re going without me?” He mentally chides himself because that very nearly came off as a whine. But she’s never gone anywhere without him, not since Therum. (Not until the end, not until—) He’d thought... they were a _team._ And now she’s _back._ And she’s taking the Cerberus guy and the mercenary?

“Yeah,” she says.

Something passes across her face, just for a second. He almost thinks he’s imagined it but when she straightens up and turns her face away from him, he’s sure; she’s never not looked people in the eye. He’s seen her tell off Wrex, retired Turian generals, Batarian radicals—hell, she’s at least two feet shorter than him and when they’d met she’d not looked away for a second throughout her entire tirade, never mind the guys he’d just shot and the gun in his hand.

But she’s not looking at him now. _She was gone for a while,_ he reminds himself. Maybe she just needs some time to adjust. Some of his methods on Omega certainly weren’t things she’d have supported and surely she’s read up on “Archangel.” Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that she’s hesitant.

But... They were a team, dammit. He’d thought they were a team, that she saw him as an equal, that she trusted him. She’d told him once that she was proud of him, that she relied on him. And now he’s here, sitting in human-only seats on a ship supposedly modelled after the Normandy—a Turian/Human _collaboration_ —and she’s going groundside without him.

“Fine,” he says. He can’t help the anger that seeps into his voice, so he doesn’t bother hiding his expression either.

She looks back up at him—just for a second—and then she waves Taylor and Massani along behind her as she exits the room without another word.

He clenches his fists at his sides. What’s he supposed to do now? Sit around the ship?

He sees Lawson in his periphery. She saunters up next to him and crosses her arms, looks toward the now closed door of the Briefing Room. “I wouldn’t take it personally,” she says. “She probably just wants you to keep an eye on me while she’s ashore.”

Something about that just grates on him. She could be right; it wouldn’t be a bad idea. If it were him in Shepard’s place, he’d leave someone he trusted to watch someone he didn’t. But that’s not how Shepard thinks. And there’s something about Lawson’s tone, about the way she just explains it all away, like it doesn’t matter that he’s stuck in this ship with fire in his veins and Shepard’s on the ground without him at her back. It _does_ matter. It matters a lot.

“Don’t talk to me about Shepard like you know her,” he grinds out, finally turning to face her.

“I do know her,” Lawson says, voice unaffected and eyes still on the door. “I rebuilt her. I know everything about her.”

“That’s not the same thing,” he says, turning and marching out of the room.

 _And you don’t,_ he adds silently.

She can’t. Because the Shepard Lawson’s claiming she knows is not the same Shepard that took Garrus on every run, that played cards with him in the Mako, that brought him a balloon while he was in the hospital. _That_ Shepard was his best friend. _That_ Shepard made him feel like he was worth something when all everyone else did was make him feel like a fuck-up. She was _his_ Shepard back then. And he’s not fucking giving her up, and not to Cerberus of all things.

...

“Good to know our pilot’s on top of things while we’re on the ground,” Garrus says, making a sharp turn and shooting down an enemy ship. 200 points.

“Right,” Joker says, taking out a couple more (600 points, the bastard). “Let me just limp right down to Omega and climb into an Atlas.”

“How’s Cerberus feel about you downloading sims to their ship?” If he can just manoeuvre around this _thing_ in his way, he can— _shit_. One engine down. Joker laughs.

“The Normandy is _my_ ship,” Joker says, flying right past Garrus without so much as an evac offer. Asshole.

“Jeff, the Normandy is—” But EDI doesn’t get to finish because Joker cuts her off with a very... rude sounding noise that he makes with his mouth. Human lips are the damnedest things. Some of them used to do that to him, back in his C-Sec days. He’d never understood what exactly they thought they were proving by making that sound; they were still handcuffed to a table, regardless.

Joker knocks out a few more bad guys (racking up 1400 more points) and Garrus gets shot down in the meantime. _Thanks for the help,_ he thinks, watching his little purple spaceship crash and burn.

He leans back in the co-pilot’s seat (which at least isn’t as uncomfortable as the chairs in the briefing room) and watches Joker pump his fists in the air in victory.

So far as distractions go, this isn’t doing quite as much as he’d hoped. He’s got a half a mind to just suit up and go down there by himself; not like there’s any shortage of assholes to shoot at. Hell, he could have spent the rest of his life on Omega (very nearly did, in fact) and there’d still be more shitheads on that rock than anywhere else. Feels that way, at least.

“What do you think about these people, Joker?”

Joker rolls his eyes and sets up another sim, solo play this time. That’s fine with Garrus; he’s not really feeling in the mood for this.

Once Joker’s got his green space ship airborne, he answers though. “I think this whole place is bugged and that if you think I’m saying shit about Lawson while Shepard’s not around to save me, then that rocket fucked up more than your pretty face.”

It doesn’t quite pull a laugh from him, but it’s close. “I take it you’re not a huge fan of your employers then.”

“I’m a fan of having my ship back. And I’m a fan of all the credits they pay me.” He shoots down three enemies right off. 600 points.

Garrus tips his head back toward the rest of the ship. “And Shepard? How’s she feel about all this?”

Joker hesitates and a bad guy takes out one of his engines. Garrus hears him curse under his breath. “You really asking?”

He has to think about that. Sure, she left him up here in this faux-Normandy with its human-centric seats and minimal dextro-rations and the after-effects of Sidonis’ betrayal swimming around in his head (and making his face hurt like hell), but she’s still Shepard. She’s still...

“I guess not,” he says, eyes dropping to his knees, bouncing with anxiety. He can’t get that image out of his head though: her sleeping under the stairs in Engineering. Her looking like she hasn’t had any rest since she left. Her down there on Omega right now and who knows what kind of shit’s getting thrown her way? But that’s the thing: _he_ knows. He’s been down there this whole time, without her beside him, and look what happened. And now she’s down there, without him. “I’m just a little worried about her, is all.”

Joker swears again, loudly this time, and when Garrus looks up the little green space ship has been blown to bits. Joker yanks his hands away from the controls and tugs his hat down a bit. “She’s fine,” he says, and it almost sounds like worry.

_I think this whole place is bugged and that if you think I’m saying shit..._

“Shepard’s gonna be fine,” he says again, flicking up the bill of his hat and looking at Garrus from the corner of his eye.

...

He waits for her on the Bridge.

He doesn’t give a fuck what Cerberus needs her to do, doesn’t care that the galaxy’s going to shit all over again. The _second_ she’s on board, Garrus is there.

“Shepard,” he says, and he doesn’t even look at her team, or at the Salarian with them. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah ok.” And she _still_ doesn’t look at him. “Just let me—”

“No,” he says. “Now.”

It’s not anger. Not quite. He doesn’t know yet if it will be later. Again, the rational part of his brain tells him he’s pushing too hard, tells him he’s letting Sidonis get to him, tells him he’s making this whole thing worse than it has to be. But he can’t stop. He can’t sit around on this fucking ship, tapping his fingers and bouncing his knees and wondering if she’s looking at him—at _Garrus_ —or if she’s looking at just some Turian she used to know, just some trigger-happy vigilante who used to be someone she trusted.

She’s still looking straight ahead, right past him, but her brows lower and whether it’s frustration or anger or something else, she nods.

“Taylor, take Mordin to debrief; I’ll be there in a minute.”

And while Taylor prattles off an obedient, if confused, “yes Commander,” and the mercenary shrugs and lumbers off, Shepard leads Garrus to the elevator and presses her thumb against the button for the Cargo Bay. He can see it in her knuckles, in the way her shoulders are far too stiff. She’s irritated.

Turians don’t order around their superiors, but he’s always said he’s a shitty Turian. He’s never had to _make_ Shepard do anything (he doubts he ever could’ve), but he didn’t board this ship so she could avoid him. So she could leave him behind to play sims with Joker while some Cerberus op watched her back, while some merc. stood in _his_ place.

When the elevator stops, she walks out like he’s not even there. Starts pulling off her armour and packing up like she doesn’t even see him anymore. He sees her lips moving, can’t make out what she’s muttering under her breath but her thoughts are clearly somewhere else.

“What the fuck, Shepard?”

She jerks her head toward him, looking so surprised he thinks she really might have forgotten he was there, what with all the concentration she was putting into removing her boots.

And that just does it, right there. That really just _does it._

“I told you I was good to work, Shepard. I told you,” he yells, throwing his arms in the air and pacing back and forth in front of the armoury. He needs to move, to keep his eyes on everything but her, to not see that damned face that surely says _Oh, Garrus, I forgot you were here._

_Don’t take it so personally, Vakarian._

_You gonna do something about it, Archangel?_

“Cerberus, Shepard? Don’t you remember all that shit they pulled?”

And sure, he’s pulled his fair share of shit on Omega but those people deserved it. He was helping. It’s not the same. And now she wants people she barely knows standing behind her with guns?

“Why didn’t you take me with you?”

He clenches his fist and spins on his heel and just stares at her, standing there dumbstruck with one boot in her hand and her socked foot propped on a bench.

 _You were gone,_ he wants to say. _You were gone and I was alone and I needed to_ do _something. I needed you and you were gone! And if I’d been on the Normandy—if I’d been there..._

“Why didn’t you take me with you?” he repeats.

She’d smiled, he remembers. Down on Omega, when he’d taken off his helmet and she’d recognized him. She’d smiled and it had been a beautiful sight. He’d thought he was hallucinating. It couldn’t be real; Shepard couldn’t be standing before him, after all this time, alive and smiling for him. _Shepard,_ he’d said, and then things had become real. The haze of exhaustion and stims and anger had cleared just enough for him to keep fighting, just enough for him to let himself believe she was really there. And she had been. And she is.

But he hasn’t seen her smile again since he woke up in the Med Bay. Not at anybody, but not at him either. And he’d thought things were different. He’s certainly different; he knows that. And she’s probably different—her hair’s shorter, anyway. But he’d worried that _they_ were different, that there was no _they_ anymore.

But now she smiles again.

“You big fucking idiot,” she says, grin wide and full of teeth and laughter falling out between the words.

He’s sure he should be indignant but he can’t find it in him. Not with her looking like that, not with her laughing and happy and the Shepard he knows _. His_ Shepard.

“You’re holed up on that rock for this long,” she continues, laughing and dropping her boot to wipe at her eyes. “And you what? _Forgot_ there was a Turian-killing _plague_?”

“I—”

Oh. He did.

He’d had a lot on his mind and he just... forgot.

Not that she’s giving him the time to explain, exactly. She’s doubled over, laughing so hard she’s crying and she only stops to throw her other boot at him and call him an idiot again.

“You can stop laughing any time now,” he finally says, all the anger and worry gone out of him. But he’d let her laugh forever. She’s his best friend. She’s _still_ his best friend. And it’s the same as he’d felt when she’d found him in that tunnel: like there’s not a better sight in the galaxy than that weird, human grin.

But she just shakes her head and takes off the rest of her armour and leads him back over to the elevator. “Did you really think I was gonna drag you out there and let you die from a cough? You already got shot in the face with a rocket, Garrus.”

He falls into place beside her and grins, nudges her with his shoulder as the elevator door shuts. “Yeah, well, as I recall, you got spaced.”

\--- --- ---

She counts eight mistakes. _Eight._ Eight times that she didn’t see something she should have or that she missed a shot because she’d been distracted or that her biotics were just all fucked up. She’s gone over and over and _over_ them in her head. Every single one of them things that shouldn’t have happened—hair in her face to hide her scars cuts off her field of vision, can’t make eye contact so she doesn’t see some asshole raising a gun, worried she’s not the one moving her muscles and thinking her thoughts has her too damn to slow to react. She’d have died each time for those kinds of screw-ups back in N7 and she’d have deserved it.

Even the mercenary had given her a nasty look—jerked her behind cover right before the bullets started flying and said “Sweetheart, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to live long enough to spend my pay.”

And he’d been right, dammit. She can’t take people out in the field if she’s going to fuck up like that. That kinda shit gets people killed.

After she’d finished her debrief with Mordin and Taylor, she’d come up to her cabin. She can’t get over being on the top floor. It pisses her off. (And not just because some asshole had decided she needed a glass ceiling.)

“Lock my door, EDI,” she says, rifling through her desk drawers for a marker.

“Yes, Shepard.”

Has she ever locked her door? Has she ever, since she’d reluctantly claimed Anderson’s old quarters on the SR-1, actually locked her door? Locked out her crew? Her team?

No. Just like she’s never led from the top fucking floor. It’s one thing to know your men will follow orders; it’s something else to be above them. That’s not who Shepard is.

 _Or not who she was, anyway,_ she thinks, looking into her bathroom mirror again.

She jerks her turtleneck over her head and lets it fall to the floor by her feet, squares her shoulders, and looks her reflection straight in the eye.

_Are you really Shepard?_

She thinks about what Zaeed said. _I’d like to live long enough..._

She thinks about Tali, back on Freedom’s Progress. Thinks about what she’d said, how she’d convinced her friend she was still on her side: _I helped you, Tali. I’m not gonna turn my back on you now._

She thinks about Garrus. _Shepard,_ he’d said. And, at the time, that had been enough. But then... _As I recall, you got spaced._

She pulls her hair through an elastic, lets the glowing orange cuts across her face shine bright and glaring in the mirror. She hates them. God, she hates them. She runs her hand over her stomach, up her arm, across her chest. All these reminders, snaking around her body, whispering to her.

_Are you really Shepard?_

She can’t _do_ this. She can’t get her people _killed_ for this.

She leans forward and draws a curve on the mirror, right under her left eye. There was a scar there: bar fight. She also draws a short line on her forehead, above her right eyebrow: fell out of a tree back home. A big, thick line where her neck meets her shoulder and a bit across her right clavicle: that was from the raid. A quick nick above her ear, too, mostly hidden by hair, from Elysium. There are more, of course. Plenty of scars missing from the rest of her body, but for now, this is enough.

_Are you really Shepard?_

It doesn’t fucking matter.

What matters is shooting straight. _Commander._


	2. Chapter 2

She’s so tired. She can feel it in every muscle, in every joint, deep in the back of her eyes and her heart: she is so, so tired. And this is a beautiful place to die. She’s loved space since she was a girl, always known the danger of it, but never been able to see anything but splendour. She could just relax, just slip into death like the cool between bed sheets and watch the stars blink out around her.

_(Don’t bring me back. Don’t let me go. Don’t bring me back. Don’t let me go.)_

But she’s spinning, she thinks, or the galaxy is spinning around her, pulling the wreckage of the Normandy into view. Jeff. _“Shepard.”_

That’s right. She can’t go.

_Shepard!_

She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe and she can’t see and she can’t move. She’s dying. She’s dying! She can’t breathe—she can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can’t—

“Shepard.”

There’s something on her arms—too tight and she jerks away and the slicing pain comes quick and sharp—and she can’t move, can’t breathe, she’s—

Awake? Where is she?

It takes a minute. There’s a sound— _whirring_ —above her and she looks up to see the shutters over the cockpit windows closing. She’s in the Normandy. The New Normandy. Whatever. She’s ok. The cockpit, the co-pilot’s seat. She’s ok. With Jeff and Garrus and they’re looking at her like...

But she’s ok.

“Shepard?” Garrus.

She holds out her hands, keeps away the concern. She just—she just needs a minute, just needs to... to...

She focuses on the console in front of Jeff, and he silently slides a copy of the nav over to her side. She forces her eyes to concentrate on the route, the straight lines, the curves, the letters blinking across the screen until she’s breathing without having to think about it. She nods— _Ok. Ok. Ok.—_ and tosses the nav away.

Horizon. She fell asleep again.

 _Fuck._ She’s starting to think that having this many people on board isn’t worth the trouble. She’s probably going to die after all this anyway (again) and she’d really rather at least have a few places to have these stupid fucking nightmares in privacy. Jeff’s getting far too accustomed to this shit.

And her arms hurt; what the fuck?

“Sorry,” Garrus says, when she looks down at herself, her sleeves torn and a bit bloody. “That was—that was my fault. I tried waking you up and when you pulled away, my talons...”

Part of her wants to laugh—fuck’s sake at least she’s _bleeding,_ at least there is still blood in her veins—but a bigger part of her is pissed. This is exactly the sort of shit she’s trying to avoid. She promised herself she wasn’t going to do this, wasn’t going to let this shit get out of her head and into her ship, as though her crew needs more reason to think she’s...

Not Shepard.

She’s supposed to be leading them, supposed to be saving the fucking galaxy ( _again_ ) and dammit, she’s going to keep them alive in the meantime. She’s not going to do _this._ At the very least, she’s going to do it in her fucking closet.

“It’s fine,” she says, shoving herself out of her chair. She needs some coffee or something, maybe some stims. She’s got to get this haze out of her head. They’ll be on Horizon within the hour and she can’t go groundside like this.

“Shepard.” Garrus grabs her wrist as she’s leaving and her heart skips.

But she’s not afraid of Garrus. She’d never be afraid of Garrus. _Just left-over jitters,_ she tells herself. It’d be a comfort, really, if she’d let it. He always seems to be where she needs him to be: back on the SR-1, ready for a game of cards; on the ground, watching her back; on Omega, the only familiar face in a sea of strangers; here, now, holding onto her like he’s keeping her from floating away into space all over again.

But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? She can’t ask him for that, can’t expect it of him. Keeping his leader fit to lead is not his job and what’s the use in having her around at all if that’s how it’s going to be?

“I’m fine,” she says again, keeping her gaze firmly on the other side of the ship. She has to; she can’t look at him and manage to pull her hand away. “Joker, I want a scan on that planet in twenty minutes.”

“Whatever you need, Commander,” he says and she winces as she walks away. She’s got to stop falling asleep in the cockpit, got to stop making this all so much worse.

She’s almost to the nav podium, shouldn’t be able to hear them talking, but hell, maybe Cerberus gave her an upgrade, maybe every single implant they stuck into her was just to make this as hard as possible, because she hears it when Garrus drops into the seat she’s left vacant. She hears it when he sighs and can see him in her mind, shutting his eyes and pressing his finger into the bridge of his nose. She hears it when Jeff says “Don’t take it personally, man.”

And then the elevator door shuts it all out.

\--- --- ---

He has to put in a very specific amount of effort to not just press into the elevator button until it makes a very satisfying crunch under his thumb. He just wants to go up to her cabin and talk. He’s not going to break anything (else).

Garrus has been fighting back his temper since he left Omega. He’s man enough to admit it: he’s got a short fuse lately. If he’s not pacing, or bouncing his knees and thumping his fingers against the mess table, he’s calibrating that damn gun as if it can actually lose accuracy just from a few hours of him not tinkering with it. He’s been clicking his talons against it so damn much, he’s only a few more calibrations away from owing Cerberus a brand new console. _Of course, if they’d accounted for Shepard’s Turian, they’d have known better than to install such a flimsy console in the first place, but no. Xenophobic fucks._

And Shepard too—something’s... wrong with her. Not with her, but for her. Something’s off. And she won’t fucking talk to him. He’d thought everything was fine; he threw his tantrum in the armoury, she’d smiled, they were Shepard and Vakarian just like before.

Except they’re not because she’s...

“Garrus,” EDI says, her voice filling the space between the elevator and the door to Shepard’s cabin, the red lock light he’s getting used to seeing plastered across it like some impenetrable barrier.

“Let me guess: Shepard’s not in her cabin.”

“That is correct.” Even EDI sounds hesitant, like she just knows he’s about to lose his temper, like she’s probably done some biochemical scan while he’s standing here, pressing his forehead into the wall and reminding himself to breathe, to act like a grown fucking man.

Maybe it’s just his nerves again. Maybe this is just like Omega and he’s so wrapped up in _shit_ that he’s not seeing what’s happening.

But it’s not just him. Joker sees it too. Asshole won’t say a word, but Garrus knows something is up.

It’s just getting harder and harder to hold it all together when all he can think about is Sidonis and his team and Shepard and every single thing about the “Normandy” that reminds him he’s not really supposed to be there. From the betrayal to the way Shepard never looks him in the eye to the way the seats on the Normandy don’t account for alien hips, it all points to the fact that _Archangel_ was going to die on Omega. That Garrus missed his chance the first time around to be where he was supposed to be: with Shepard on the SR-1, flying over Alchera one way or the other. That _Archangel_ belonged in the shithole he’d gotten himself stuck in and that the man Shepard dragged out of there wasn’t supposed to leave that tunnel.

It’s all just too much and he needs Shepard and he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on with her but she needs him too and everything had come crashing down on them both when they’d been groundside on Horizon and Kaidan had stepped away.

“Kaidan, you _know_ me.” But she wasn’t telling him, she was asking. She was begging. And Garrus couldn’t stand it—couldn’t take that look on her face, couldn’t take her begging for the loyalty she’d earned. And he couldn’t take the way she’d looked at him when he’d called Alenko on his shit, the way everything about her face told him she hadn’t expected him to back her up, that she hadn’t expected anyone to come to her defence, that maybe she actually fucking believed she didn’t deserve it.

And it’s _still_ eating him up, making him fighting mad, as if he’s not always mad lately, as if he’s not always holding back a punch because his mind is swimming with every shitty thing that’s happened to them both.

He turns around and braces his back against the wall, slides down until he’s sitting on the floor. He shuts his eyes and leans his head back and he can’t figure it out. He can’t think back on the moment this all got so complicated, the moment Shepard started putting up that wall and he didn’t know how to get over it.

He just wants to go back to playing cards in the Mako, just wants a do-over. He’d stay on the Original Normandy, he’d get her out alive. He’d have carried her to bed when he found her sleeping down in engineering. He’d make her laugh. He wouldn’t have to look for her right now because after something like this, after a friend breaks her heart, she’d come to him instead of hiding wherever she hides these days.

The elevator doors open with a little _whoosh_ and he opens his eyes to tell Lawson that “no, Shepard’s not here, you can’t really be surprised at this point,” and Shepard’s standing over him with her hands propped on her hips.

“Are, uh... are you ok?” The genuine concern makes him want to crawl in the vents and hide.

“You know what, Shepard? Hell if I know.” And he just shuts his eyes again and lets his head fall back against the wall with a heavy _thunk_ because this is ridiculous. Six hours ago, he thought he was about to witness tears for the first time since Ash died and now she’s standing over him, wide eyed and fresh faced and with a grin tugging at her lips, asking him if _he’s_ ok and no. No, he’s not. He’s got a headache and he’s confused and he has decided—once and for all—that he will never understand women or humans and human women in particular. No matter how well he thinks he knows them, no matter how fucking great they are, no matter that Shepard’s his fucking beacon in the dark—he’s got no idea how she’s gone from stopping his heart cold in his chest on Horizon to standing before him now, looking like there’s not a damn thing wrong in this fucked up galaxy. _You have got to be kidding me._

She slides down next to him and he can feel her bump him with her hip and shoulder. When she leans against him, he’s got half a mind to just shove her and send her sliding right across the floor. It would serve her right and if he didn’t think she’d get a kick out of it, he’d have probably already done it. The other half of his mind is angrily but seriously thinking about just wrapping his arms around her and telling her he’s not letting go until... well, maybe just never.

“Guess where we’re going,” she says. And she sounds like herself; she really does. Like she’s actually happy.

But he doesn’t open his eyes. If he does, he’ll probably see her grinning like a fool with a secret and damn if he doesn’t want to see that but he knows that’s not all there is in her face. He’ll see those ever darkening circles that mean she’s still not been getting any sleep. He’ll see the thick black of another sweater—one he hasn’t accidentally ripped the sleeves of, one that doesn’t show the scratches left behind on her arms. He’ll see Shepard pretending everything is fine and hiding from him in plain fucking sight. “Where?”

“We’re going to blow up a Cerberus base!”

\--- --- ---

Shepard has always believed in taking joy in the little things. It’s a lesson she learned from her father, ever the optimist that he was, always able to find some good in a crappy situation.

And this isn’t for her, it’s for Jack. She knows that. And once they’ve gone through the facility and Jack’s put the bomb right where she wants it, they board the shuttle and Shepard passes her the Big Red Button without hesitation. Jack _deserves_ this. And Shepard’s honoured just to have been offered a role in it.

But, in a tiny secret place, Shepard does it for herself too. For the first time in weeks, Shepard lowers the shutters on the windows and presses her face against the glass to look out into the endless nothing that killed her. And she reaches behind her for Garrus’ hand (and he’s there, always by her side, right where she needs him) and she and Jack countdown from three.

Three. For stealing a little girl away from her family and the life she could’ve had. For stealing away all those children and everything they could’ve been, every person they could’ve loved, every moment of happiness they never got. (And for pretending to be good guys after everything they’ve done to them both.)

She squeezes his hand. He squeezes back.

Two. For all the pain Jack suffered, for all the meds and needles and punches they didn’t pull. For cutting her up on the outside and tearing her to pieces on the inside. (And for every nightmare she has, for every time Shepard looks in a mirror and can’t find herself there.)

She looks away from the window, just for a second, just to make sure Garrus is still there with her. And he is.

One. Because _fuck you, that’s why._ And the whole goddamn place is blown to bits behind them. It’s got nothing on the way the Normandy was shot down, nothing on the way pieces of her home fell burning through the atmosphere of Alchera while she floated away up above it, but god does it feel good.

She doesn’t mean to do it, doesn’t think about it. She’s just watching the colors, watching the fire and smoke and debris through the window and then she’s looking at blue eyes and blue markings across the bridge of her best friend’s nose and then she’s looking at the inside of her eyelids and her lips are pressed against his face and she feels like she’s alive again.

_Oh._

“Get a fucking room,” Jack says.

And Shepard claps her hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she says, the words muffled against her palm. “I—I just—”

And Garrus just looks her in the eyes and says “It’s ok.”

...

Somehow, between nightmares, panic attacks, and worrying that she’s some sort of cyborg puppet for terrorists, Shepard just sort of forgot she used to really like her hair.

It was longer, before she... died. Probably she lost most of it in the process of _whatever._ But before all that, she used to really like her hair. Long and brown and curly and even full of frizz, it reminded her of home, of her family—all of them had thick, dark hair; got that from their mother.

And it used to be that on the days when Shepard felt like shit about herself—when she could still afford to have those days—she’d braid her hair or just run her fingers through it and she just felt _better._ She felt... well, she felt pretty.

And not once since she woke up in that lab has she looked in a mirror and seen anything but glowing, orange scars.

_Are you really Shepard?_

And she’d thought that surely she was. She felt like Shepard, felt like _herself._ But that’s just what Cerberus would want her to feel, isn’t it? And then she’d realized that the galaxy was falling apart around her and that fire fights weren’t the best time for an existential crisis, but how was she supposed to figure this out? How was she supposed to know if she was really her or if...

Thane said, the other day, that his people believe the body and soul to be so separate that one has no say over the other. It’d been hard for her to stomach, at first, as though it were just a way to shed responsibility for misdeeds.

But she knows Thane quite well now. She knows his heart. Thane Krios kills people, but he is not quite a killer. Or not just a killer. Or perhaps not a killer at all.

Maybe she’s just grabbing at whatever slows her fall, but right now, looking in her mirror covered in the sharpie’d scars of her past-life, she’d like to think that she _is_ Shepard, whether her body is quite hers or not.

And she’d like to think that her hair, though a bit shorter, is still... pretty.

And she’d like to think that maybe her best friend thinks those things too.

\--- --- ---

When they finally dock the shuttle on Tuchanka, Shepard greets Wrex in the most un-Krogan-like manner possible and Garrus isn’t really sure if he’s surprised or not when Wrex actually hugs her back. (Of course, then they do that weird chest-bumping thing and grunt, so he decides that no, he’s not surprised.) Still, Shepard’s been practically vibrating with excitement since she had Joker set a course here and while he’s glad to see that she seems to be feeling better ( _since Pragia_ , he thinks, but he pushes that away), there is something very different in the way Shepard grins at Wrex. Something about the way she doesn’t flinch, about the way her shoulders are squared and proud and not weighed down by everything she carries.

It’s almost like the way she’d looked at him, before, on Omega, if a bit bolder, a bit less hesitant.

And it almost makes him jealous.

Not of Wrex, not exactly. Not like she’s got a thing for Wrex. ( _Not that that matters._ ) But more like that she used to be this comfortable around him, too. She used to be this comfortable, this vibrant and open, all the time and he’s missed that. He’s missed seeing her under real sunlight—any sun—looking alive and exhilarated. He’s missed hearing her laugh (and she always laughed so loud, always had heads turning to look her way, fingers pressing against lips to hush her up in quiet places). He’s missed the way she holds her chin up and narrows her eyes and her lips curve into a little grin right before she does something unexpected (unexpected to others, anyway, not him; he’d fully expected her to headbutt that Krogan).

And something tightens in his chest when she smiles like that, when she yells his name across a camp full of Krogan and waves him over to her side. (And he’s not thinking about how she kissed him on that shuttle, of course he’s not; _that was nothing, after all, that was just excitement, that was just—_ ) This is how it’s supposed to be—not Reapers and Collectors and Cerberus—just Shepard and Vakarian.

A heavy arm falls around his shoulders and Wrex laughs. “Maybe you oughtta pay a little more attention to Shepard this time around,” he says, before he makes his way back to his... what is that, anyway? Throne of Bones? And Garrus rolls his eyes. Only Krogan would have a throne of body parts and anyway, he has no idea what that means; he’s always followed Shepard’s orders.

But Garrus does pay attention.

While they’re driving out to... wherever the hell Krogan go to deal with their adolescent hormones, he watches her. The way she relaxes against the inside of the rover, all loose shoulders and elbows on her knees and grins because whatever the hell they’re doing, she can’t wait to do it.

And when they’re on the field, fighting back monsters (because apparently _that’s_ how Krogran deal with their adolescent hormones), he watches her. The way she moves across the battlefield like she’s not even really moving, like the world’s moving around her _and why wouldn’t it,_ he thinks. How she can move like that and still dance like a Hanar is beyond him, but damn _. Probably just a Shepard thing._

And when there’s a breath between the moments of madness, when she readies them for the next wave, he watches her. The way her eyes light up because she’s glad to be moving, glad to be doing something she thinks is worth doing, and her eyes have always been green but it’s never reminded him quite so much of home.

And when she passes Grunt her last round of ammo and stands back to let him take the kill shot on a Thresher Maw, Garrus watches her. She stands beside him and the wind is whipping sand against her skin and she’s watching Grunt with a proud smirk on her face and Garrus has always known Shepard was beautiful, but it was different, wasn’t it? To know it and then to stand beside her and _know_ it? It sort of feels different, but it sort of doesn’t.

And when they’re back on the Normandy and he’s in the battery, he doesn’t really feel like calibrating guns. He’s just absently flipping through his messages and he feels sort of like maybe he knows what Wrex was talking about. And he’s wondering if maybe Shepard would think he’s crazy or if maybe, back on that shuttle from Pragia—

But then his omni-tool pings and that’s probably a good thing, he reasons. This probably isn’t the best train of thought to follow through with, wherever the hell it was going.

\--- --- ---

Shepard’s not completely convinced all these tests are actually necessary. Doc, at least, never seems to use as many needles as Mordin does.

“I really don’t think— _ow,_ Mordin, damn, warn a woman, would you?”

“Makes tests difficult,” he says quickly, carefully pulling away a syringe. Then he looks up and pauses for a fraction of a second—a very meaningful amount of time for him—and clears his throat. “ _More_ difficult.”

She starts to get up when he turns his back to look at a screen—full of far too many graphs; he can’t possibly have that much information about her health—but he shakes a finger at her and she situates herself back in the chair, resigned.

“This just seems unnecessary, Mordin. I don’t even know what you’re studying anymore. You lost me somewhere around three weeks ago when you said—hell, I dunno, something something chemical markers.”

He keeps his eyes on his charts but she doesn’t dare try to sneak out again.

“Understand, but stress levels putting strain on body; noticed sleeping medications missing from shelf in Med Bay.”

 _Shit._ Why’s he even regulating their medical stores? That’s Doc’s job anyway. Unless... _Oh, Chakwas, you didn’t._ But she probably did. Between EDI, Doc, and Jeff, Shepard’s starting to wonder if she’s taking care of her crew at all or if they’re all just cleaning up after her.

She takes a deep breath. “Listen, Mordin, this really isn’t a big deal, ok? I just—”

“Pride no good for stress, Shepard.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the guns are for,” she says, leaning back in her seat. She reaches over toward the window sill and hits the button for the shutters. If she’s going to be forced to bullshit her way through a conversation like this, she’s at least not going to be staring down the endless void while she does it. And anyway, she feels much better today than she has in a while. Wrex’s influence, without doubt. She already misses him and they haven’t even left orbit yet.

Mordin, thankfully, goes straight to his little tinkering table and though he does give her a quick glance, he doesn’t stare her down. “Pride no good for health, period, Shepard. Not for you.”

“I’m fine, Mordin.”

He stops what he’s doing, just for a second, and his shoulders stiffen in frustration.

“Untrue,” he says, his back moving with his hands again. She hears the telltale thump and grind of a pestle. “But clearly too stubborn to respond to personal concern. Pride no good for health no good for crew. Listening now?”

She huffs. Sure. Sure, she’s fucking listening now. “Fine. What do you want me to do? I’m not crying with Chambers though, so don’t even try it.”

She can hear the smile in his voice when he answers. Little victories. “Understandable. But need stress-relieving activities, regain confidence... also feed fish.”

 _Shit. The fish._ “I thought we established that shooting things _is_ stress relief.”

“Intended something more... interpersonal. Intercourse, for example.”

Oh god.

“Would recommend Mr. Moreau, seems amicable relationship, however—”

_Oh god._

“Hormone levels indicate preference—”

“Mordin, stop!” And thank god—any god, her mother’s god, the Hanar Enkindlers, Kalahira, whatever—he stops. She can barely manage much more than just furiously shaking her head. This is... not a topic she wants to discuss with her completely unofficial Salarian doctor. Hell, she got enough of that nonsense on Tuchanka. And anyway— _hold on just a goddamn second_. “Hormone levels?”

She narrows her eyes at Mordin’s back and he continues mixing something on his table. “Had EDI run regular scans. Medical purposes, of course.”

“You—you _scanned_ me?” And then she’s giving the ceiling a very dirty look. “What the hell EDI?”

“Doctor’s orders,” EDI says. And if it weren’t at Shepard’s expense, she’d actually applaud EDI for the humour. But considering that it _is_ at Shepard’s expense—

Mordin turns toward the door, where Garrus is leaning in and looking around. She hadn’t even heard him come in. _Great. Let’s just have a meeting about it._

“Hey, uh, Shepard? When you get a minute...”

“I’ll come to down the battery in a little while,” she says, silently begging him to just go. Far away. Far, far away from this conversation and Wrex’s stupid, gravelly laughter echoing in her head. _Fucking aliens and fucking pheromones and..._

“Right.” Something’s up. It’s that tone of voice again. She can just feel it.

But he’s not even got to the elevator before Mordin’s pulled up _another_ graph and is pointing to a spike in the patterns. “Scans clearly indicate—”

“You scanned me just _now_?”

“Shepard,” he says, like he’s just lost all patience with her. “‘Regular’ indicative of frequent and repetitive measures.”

 _Shouldn’t even leave Tuchanka,_ she thinks. _Should just find another Thresher Maw to shoot. Feed Mordin to the Krogan. Jump out the airlo—_

That last one used to be funny...

\--- --- ---

“Garrus, wait.”

But he doesn’t want to wait. He’s done enough waiting. Sidonis is here. Now. And Garrus is going to kill him.

He’s got to.

Sidonis is the reason it all went to shit, the reason his whole team died. Sidonis fucked them over and Garrus is going to make him pay for it, just like all the others.

And dammit, Shepard is not going to stop him. Not this time. This isn’t about mercy or second chances or integrity or anything else. This is about putting a bullet through that bastard’s skull.

But she’s got her hand on his arm and if this weren’t the first time she’s even touched him since Pragia, he’d shove her away. He doesn’t want to hear it; whatever she’s going to say, he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s been a wreck. He’s been nothing but a walking timebomb, full of guilt and anger and frustration and just when he’d started to forget about this shit, Sidonis shows back up. That matters.

“Don’t, Shepard. I know you don’t approve, I get that, but are you honestly about to tell me that if some guy killed your crew—killed _us—_ you’d let him walk?”

She looks down, then out the window, and he can barely hear her when she answers. “No,” she says. “I’d do it. And it wouldn’t be so quick as a headshot.”

“Then we agree. Now let’s go.”

But she grabs his arm again and dammit, that’s _enough_.

“That’s not what you’re asking,” she says and he exhales. She’s not going to let him do this, is she? She’s not going to just get out of the car and just _fucking let him kill the bastard._

“If someone came onto our ship and killed our crew, you know I’d do it. You know I’d kill them.”

“Then _let’s go._ ”

“Sidonis isn’t ‘someone,’ though. And that’s not what you’re asking. If it was you, Garrus—”

“Don’t do that,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “Don’t fucking compare me to him, Shepard. Just don’t.” He’s pissed. If it were anybody else, anyone but her, he’d have already broken their nose. At the very least.

“If it was you and me and a scope between us? I couldn’t. It wouldn’t matter.”

“You think I can’t do it?” There are plenty of things Garrus doesn’t know, plenty of things he’s never been able to do. But not this. This is clear and easy and he’s right _fucking_ there.

“It doesn’t matter if you _can,_ ” she says, and he’s glad the windows of the skycar are up because what he doesn’t need right now is all these civilians looking over to see a couple having a domestic spat in a rental. “It’s not about him, Garrus. I’m not telling you to forgive the bastard. But this isn’t going to bring them back—”

“ _That’s enough_.” He hadn’t meant to yell at her. He hadn’t. But it’s done. It’s over. This isn’t about talking things through. This isn’t about his feelings. This isn’t about anything but killing Sidonis. “Are you with me or not, Shepard?”

She unbuckles her safety belt and opens the door. “I’m always with you, Garrus.”

...

Garrus has watched Shepard through a scope so many times, he’s lost count.

That’s how a sniper sees, that’s how he’s kept her safe since that very first mission on Therum.

But only twice has he ever had his finger on the trigger when she was in the crosshairs.

On Omega, when he was drinking, he thought about her a lot—more than he thought about her when he was sober, and that said enough. And it was like that, sometimes: like he was on the field, at her back, watching her through his scope and feeding her the details she needed to keep moving forward. He’d gotten used to the view, so it was no wonder. And it was no wonder, too, that when he was stuck in that tunnel and high on stims and starving and exhausted and about to die—of course it was no wonder that Archangel saw her again, through the scope of his gun. Garrus would know her anywhere. Hallucination, Cerberus armour, death haze—whatever was between them, Garrus would always know Shepard. And he did know. It didn’t make sense—she was dead; they had drilled that into him over and over and _over_ , she was dead—but there she was, coming up that bridge, in the crosshairs.

And Archangel had pulled the trigger.

Not a kill shot, nothing that would do any damage. But there’d been a scope between him and Shepard— _his Shepard—_ and he’d taken a shot.

And now it’s him and her and a scope between them again and his finger’s on the trigger.

He’s not gonna take a shot; of course he’s not, not while she’s standing there. But there’s a scope between Garrus and Shepard, because Garrus and Shepard are between Archangel and Sidonis.

Before Shepard—long, long before Shepard, he’d always had a thing for sniping. He was good at it. He enjoyed it. And it got the job done. He and his rifle took down bad guy after bad guy after bad guy. And it was like that at first with Shepard too. She brought him onboard, then she took him groundside and he and his rifle took down bad guys. That’s why he’d wanted to come along, after all: to take down Saren, to take down Dr. Heart, to take down the Reapers. But somewhere along the line, it stopped being about that. It was about this tiny human woman—total badass, of course—who played cards with him in the Mako when everyone else was sleeping. It was about taking down anything that was trying to take her, anything that was looking at her through a scope with their finger flush against a trigger.

He still wants to kill Sidonis; there’s not a shred of mercy left in him for the traitor. But he looks at the back of her head, the loose curls of her hair, and he wonders which guy he is now— _right now—_ if his finger is on the trigger and his scope is pointed at Shepard.

“You still wanna do this?” She says through his radio.

“Fuck this,” he says back. “Get back up here and let’s just go.”


	3. Chapter 3

Shepard has died so many times, she has trained her body to wake quietly from the terror.

Eyes open. _Stop._ Look around. _Stop._ Breathe. _Stop._ Breathe again. _We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine._

It’s got to be the cybernetics; no way she could sleep this little and still be alive, otherwise. But still, she finds herself falling into fitful sleep all over the ship: the showers, the Cargo Bay, the AI Core, anywhere but under that shutterless gaping void in her cabin. But far too often these days, she wakes up in the co-pilot’s chair, trying to catch her breath while Jeff silently closes the shutters, or passes her something—anything—to focus on, or, if she’s lucky, he sleeps on, undisturbed by her thrashing.

It’s quite the show they put on these days: pretending they’re not both slowly dying of guilt, her for what it’s doing to him and him for what he thinks he’s done to her.

But this time she is lucky. This time, she wakes up and catches her breath and Jeff is still asleep. The cards she was holding have fallen into her seat, onto the floor. Damn, she had a good hand too. Jeff’s folded, placed his in a neat pile on the console and she can’t help but peek. Damn, he had a better hand. Probably would have won that one; she’ll have to throw their next game, make it up to him with a week’s worth of fig-flavoured nutribars (no great loss on her part, really).

She eases herself out of her chair, careful not to wake him, and rescues his precariously positioned cap from the arm of his seat on her way out of the cockpit.

She doesn’t mean to sleep here, to worry him, really she doesn’t. But there are so few places she feels safe, so few places she can relax enough to accidentally fall asleep.

She stretches her arms above her head and walks to the nav podium. “What time is it EDI?”

“The off-shift will end in twenty-three minutes, Shepard.”

“Thank you.”

She lets her fingers drift along the console and thinks about spending an extra day on the Citadel. Collectors or no, they need some rations and she needs a bit more... something. Alcohol, maybe. Artificial sunlight. Hell, maybe she’ll rent a skycar and make Bailey’s day more interesting.

Really though, it’s about time she heads down to the Battery. If Garrus isn’t already tinkering with the big gun or his gun or her gun or some barely salvageable thing he picked up on a run, he will be soon enough. And they haven’t really... She knows things didn’t end how he’d planned them with Sidonis and she’s not sure if she owes him an apology or a killshot or just a hug.

\--- --- ---

Usually, Garrus is a straightforward kind of guy—in every sense. Point A to Point B, math, say what you mean, all that. But he’s starting to see the advantage in mindless chatter, in circular conversation, in “beating around the bush,” as Shepard says.

He’d found her in the Battery this morning, anxiously wringing her hands around the railings and looking just as tired as she always does these days.

“What are you doing down here?” A question he should’ve asked her a while back.

“Oh. Hey. I was looking for you, actually.” An answer he’d been waiting to hear for longer than he’d thought.

And now, somewhere a little nearer the top than “better heating” and “less noise,” he’s got one more thing to add to his list of “Reasons the Battery is a Better Place to Hang Out than the Cargo Bay.”

And that reason is sitting on the floor in the dark with Shepard, their backs pressed together and fingers laced in that nice-but-awkward five-on-three way that he could really get used to, and him making idle conversation while she drifts in and out of fitful sleep.

“You really ok about Sidonis?”

“Yeah. I really am.”

He can feel her relax against his back, feel her head drop back along the outside of his shoulder. Ten minutes, and she jerks back awake, catches her breath, says she’s sorry.

_It’s ok, Shepard._

“I was thinking we should take a day on the Citadel. We’re running low on dextro-stuff, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”

This time, when her body droops back, he leans forward a little, so her upper half doesn’t slide to the floor. Fifteen minutes, and she bolts upright, swears under her breath and says she’s sorry again.

_It’s ok, Shepard._

“So I’m guessing you’ve got this giant gun all ready to shoot up some bad guys?”

“If I haven’t got that thing shooting straight by now, you should fire me.”

Twenty minutes, and she comes to a little gentler this time, but still, she apologizes once more.

 _I’m glad you’re sleeping. I’m glad you’re here. I’d stay here all day._ “It’s ok, Shepard.”

She twists around a bit, not quite enough for them to be side by side, not quite enough for him to look her in the eye, but enough for her hand to slip out of his and for her breath to fall against his shoulder when she speaks.

“So, what do you think, Garrus? Honestly? We gonna live through this one?”

This is the first time Garrus has ever considered lying to her. _Yes,_ he wants to say. _We will. We’re gonna be fine, Shepard. You’re gonna be fine._

“I don’t know. This whole thing, it—it’s big.”

“Yeah.” Her head falls back against him, not in sleep, but in almost-resignation.

He shifts, turns so that they _are_ side by side and takes her hand again, for himself if nothing else. “If anybody can do this, Shepard, it’s you.” And it’s not a lie. It’s really not.

“Us,” she mutters, and he’s about to give her a little nudge— _glad you didn’t forget I’m the superior shot_ —but then she goes on. “Did it feel like this? On Omega?”

“Sort of. Like there wasn’t an end to aim at.”

She squeezes his hand. _So for her too, then_ , he thinks, brushing the pad of his thumb along the back of her hand.

“I think you’re right,” she says. “I think we can do it.”

...

“Alright boys,” Jeff says.

Samara clears her throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he amends. “And Jack.”

“Fuck you.”

“Who’s in?” A few hands go to the middle of the table—Taylor and Thane, Zaeed, Samara, and Garrus, too, after a pause—and Joker deals a hand of cards.

Jack drops a couple beers on the table and Joker’s popping one open before he’s even finished dealing. Garrus takes one too, slides it over to his place at the table, and looks at his cards. He and Shepard play cards all the time—or they did before all this; they haven’t really had time for that lately. But even then, she’d humoured him, learned games he already knew. He’s not a hundred percent sure he’s got the rules for this one down, but hell, if Taylor can do it, he can do it.

And he needs the distraction.

For one thing, she’s gone off without him again. “Can’t have the infamous Archangel crashing this party,” she’d said. And sure, he has to admit he’d been temporarily pacified when she leaned in and whispered “Next time, though, for sure, right?”

But only temporarily. The effect had worn off after an anxious couple of hours spent imagining every possible thing that could go wrong (and if Garrus is good at anything, it’s pessimistic probabilities). It’s not like that dress is heavy-duty armour, after all. And Kasumi—well, sure, she’s good at what she does but the both of them are sort of... soft.

For another thing:

Zaeed takes a drink and cracks his knuckles. “So how many beer’s it gonna take to get tongues waggin’ about our illustrious leader in that little black number?”

Yeah, that’s the other thing.

“No way,” Taylor says, shaking his head and tossing a card into the pile. “We’re not disrespecting our Commanding Officer.”

“Well maybe you ain’t, boy scout, but she ain’t my Commander, is she? But sure, you have fun sitting in your little corner and pretending you weren’t lookin’.”

“I’m with Massani,” Jack says, taking a walk around the table and looking at everyone’s cards (except Thane’s; he hides his protectively under the table). “Shepard looked hot.”

Garrus rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb. He’s pretty sure this card is... good? He puts a low card in the spare pile and draws one from the deck—Ten. Is that better? Wait. Do the suits matter in this game, or just the numerical values?

Jack elbows him and gives him a quick nod. So... yeah. Ok.

While Samara fingers the corners of her cards in thought, Joker grabs a second bottle and chugs half of it before he even takes his turn.

“It does seem like she’d be better off wearing something that garners less notice on a stealth run,” Thane says, dropping another card into the pile. “If that’s what she was going for, anyway.” Garrus watches him, but the guy’s got _no_ tells and not really being able to make out his pupil from his iris from his sclera doesn’t help.

“You kidding?” Zaeed snorts, then rearranges a couple cards and pulls one out of the deck. “Shepard’s a goddamn force of nature; you think the fuckin’ dress is gonna be what those uppity assholes are starin’ at?”

“ _You_ were certainly staring at it, Zaeed,” Samara points out and Garrus is very glad that no one else at the table has access to a visor that reveals spikes in body temperature. Not that Garrus had been _staring_ , exactly.

He pulls another card from the pile—another ten, maybe this is the game where you need pairs—and tosses an Ace. Right afterward, he decides that was probably a bad move; Aces are usually important, but he’s not actually bet anything but a couple of rations no one else can eat, so it doesn’t much matter if he loses. And anyway, he’s seen Shepard in less. Towels and things. Just sort of happens when you live together on a ship for months at a time. Just sort of happens when you’re focused on taking down a rogue spectre together. Not that he’d been looking before, not exactly.

“Hell fuckin’ yeah, I was starin’,” Zaeed says, tilting his head back toward the main body of the ship. “How often you seen her in anything but the blood of her enemies? Has its own appeal, sure, but hell.”

Taylor reaches for a beer and gives Zaeed a smack on the arm. “You don’t think she deserves a _little_ more respect than that, Massani?”

“Hey, girl’s done good by me and could probably plough my ass into the ground if she wanted. Ain’t disrespect. You can get your tighties out of a twist, yeah?”

Joker finishes off another beer and Garrus rubs his nose again; he’s not even sure what ‘tighties out of a twist’ means, but he’s really just wishing everyone would get to shit-talking each other over cards. That’s a conversation he knows how to have. And it doesn’t make him feel like the collar of his shirt is tightening around his neck and trying to suffocate him.

“ _Unless,_ ” Zaeed says, and Garrus just knows this is actually about to get more awkward than it already is. “You gettin’ a little green over there, boy scout?”

 _What in the hell does that even mean?_ If they’re going to torture him, they could at least have the decency to stop using so many weird human phrases. Garrus pulls another card from the pile but he doesn’t pause to look at it.

Joker snorts. Seems the beer’s getting to him; he’s getting a bit red in the face. (And Garrus is starting to think that maybe he ought to have a few drinks himself.)

Taylor rolls his eyes, throws a card, and says “I’ve got no reason to be jealous of _you._ ”

“I’m a catch,” Zaeed says, full of false-indignation. “And _great_ in bed,” he adds, winking.

Garrus tugs at his collar. Not like he hasn’t ever had these conversations before, but... they were always about _Turian_ women. And they were most definitely not about Shepard—most definitely not about her coming out of the elevator half-shy, half-beaming in a little black dress, blush creeping across her face and chest and the way she’d sounded when she’d whispered “Next time, though, for sure, right?” The way her breath fell across his face and her fingers were tangled with his when no one else was looking. Definitely not about that.

“Fuck that,” Joker says, tossing a card into the pile. He’s a little sloppy about it, though, and he tips his hand toward Garrus’ side of the table. Two Aces—damn, he should’ve kept the one he had before. “Taylor’s got no reason to be jealous of anybody. Shepard wouldn’t hit that to kill a Reaper.”

Jack laughs as she’s making her way around to look at cards again and even Thane politely covers his mouth. Garrus is thinking maybe he should fold. He’s got no idea what he’s doing, he’s really wishing he started drinking half an hour ago, and it is just really warm in this room.

Taylor lets one of his hands fall heavily against the table and he sighs. “I never said anything about that.” But Garrus makes a point of not looking at him—he doesn’t want to know if Taylor means what he says.

“Besides,” Joker says, and when Garrus looks at him—finishing off another bottle—it’s clear he’s a little drunk. If the red cheeks and unfocused eyes and bottle collection weren’t making that clear, the startling amount of genuine sentiment in his voice certainly does. “None of you assholes are good enough for her anyway.”

“What? Not even Archangel over here?” Jack pats him on the shoulders like they’re old work buddies. Of course. Starts out helping him play cards, ends up turning traitor at the end. They always do, don’t they? He’s got three ten’s, a pair of two’s and a Queen left. So he tosses a two and draws an eight from the pile and prays that no one is actually looking at him.

“Garrus doesn’t count,” Taylor says. _And why the fuck not?_ But he keeps his eyes on his cards. “He’s not even human.”

That... actually kind of makes sense. Shepard is, well, human, among other things. And it’s not that he’s bothered by that, not that he cares that they’re different; this sort of thing happens all the time doesn’t it? There was Fleet and Flotilla for one thing; that counts. Or if doesn’t, he’s going to count it anyway. And Asari have partners from pretty much every species. And he’s sure, thinking about it, that he knew a guy or two back in C-Sec who married human women. Yeah. That jackass who worked Evidence married one. Her name was Carrie or something.

It’s just that he’s never—does _she_ care? He thinks about the way she’d jerked awake in the cockpit a few weeks back, the way his talons had sliced right through her clothes, through her skin. The marks are gone—he’d looked. She’s not worn anything but body armour and sweaters since Omega, so of course he’d looked while he had the chance. But he wonders if she sometimes runs her hands up her arms, feeling for the scratches. He wonders if she thinks about that, when she’s holding his hand—on a shuttle or in the dark of the Main Battery—while all he’s thinking about is... just her. It’s kinda been “just her” for a while now, hasn’t it?

Joker mutters _xenophobe_ under his breath and Garrus passes him another beer.

“That’s not what I meant.” But Taylor’s having a hard time convincing Samara, who is giving him a very stern look. It reminds Garrus so much of his father, he almost feels bad for the guy. Almost.

And he’s thinking that at least the conversation is moving away from him—Taylor’s not having such a good time at the moment, but hey, sacrifices must be made—and then Zaeed gives him a friendly punch on the arm. “How ‘bout it, Vakarian?”

Yeah, he should definitely fold. He’s not cut out for this. He’d rather be shooting into a swarm of Collectors or giving Mordin tissue samples or fighting Wrex hand-to-hand in a pit—anything. It’s not like he planned this, after all. It’s not like when he met first met her on the Citadel, before all this started, he thought _Yeah, good idea: I’ll follow her to hell and then I’ll just... then I’ll just..._

“Sure seemed happy enough with the idea when they were smashing their faces together on the way back from Pragia,” Jack says.

Well.

“I, uh—I’m gonna go check the, uh, the gun.” He folds and, despite the looks, walks right out (maybe a _bit_ too quickly).

When the door shuts behind him, he just takes a minute to breathe. The silence on the other side of the door makes him feel a little sick; he can imagine the eyes that followed him as he’d walked away, can think of a few jokes that are probably going to start flying now that he’s gone.

But what he does hear, after a few seconds, is Joker. “Told you assholes she had standards.”

\--- --- ---

This is amazing. Shepard’s seen her fair share of amazing things, but this is truly something else.

A single life, when weighed against the whole of the galaxy and every wonder in it, seems a small thing. But she’s never really agreed with that and now, standing _inside_ a life, she thinks she was right. About a lot of things.

“This is Keiji?”

Kasumi smiles and flicks her fingers in the air. Everything shifts around them—images and sounds and smells; it’s almost overwhelming. “Good question,” she says.

Kasumi stops things—everything—and Shepard sees her lying on a bed, smiling up them, laughing. Happy. With Keiji. “This is everything Keiji was,” she says. “So yes, I suppose it is him.”

And then Kasumi flicks her fingers again, effortlessly navigating the mind of the man she knew, the man she loved, and Keiji’s voice is all around them. It’s pressing in on Shepard like atmospheric pressure, but it’s inside her too, echoing, pulsing through her body like her own blood. This is Keiji. This is data, strings of numbers and associations mapped to senses, but not just that. Shepard hears Keiji’s voice and feels it too, and she can remember the first time he ever spoke to Kasumi, what he said, how he felt, the way his voice sounded so much more confident than he actually was. She knows what it was like to work a job with her—all adrenaline and cocky grins and sparkling eyes. She knows what it was like to love her—depth and warmth and want, the same adrenaline and cocky grins and sparkling eyes.

For her safety, he says, Kasumi has to let him go. “But this,” Kasumi says, eyes covered by her hood. “This is just a pre-recorded message. It’s all... pre-recorded. It’s all already over, already gone. So no, I suppose—” She swallows and Shepard puts a hand on her shoulder. “I suppose it also isn’t,” she concludes.

It is and it isn’t Keiji Okuda. It’s a copy, a back-up. But maybe not quite alive. Maybe not quite able to _keep_ being a person, after the last memory stored inside. Maybe not quite a soul, if there really is such a thing. But maybe it—he—is.  

What would Shepard give? To see her parents again? Her brothers? To live here in this quiet place with them and smell the smells of a farm on Mindoir, to feel the scrape of skin against tree bark on the quick fall down, to feel her hands working with their hands to turn a wrench on that monstrous blue tractor?

Could she get them back? Could she really get them back?

Can people _come back_? Did _she_?

Kasumi reaches out and takes Shepard’s hand, lacing their fingers together, and she looks away, to a memory of the two of them—Kasumi and Keiji—arms wrapped around each other, standing before a mirror, him smiling into her hair.

“What do I do, Shepard?”

_I don’t know._

...

She hasn’t worn heels in so long. And it certainly showed at the party—hell, if she’d been forced to fight in them, she’d have probably fallen and killed herself. But there’s something familiar in the way she carries them, holding them by the straps, letting them dangle from her fingers, while she walks barefooted to the Battery.

She’d walked home from a school dance like this. Not just like this—the dress had been blue and far more... modest. Her mother never would’ve let her set foot out of the house in something this tight. It’s a funny thought, all things considered. But she remembers; it’s as clear and present a memory as Keiji’s had been. Moreso, perhaps, since it’s her own.

And this—the ship, the mess hall, the Battery—it’s all real and physical around her. She left the graybox. Didn’t she?

When the door opens, Garrus leaps up from his seat like there’s been gunfire and she almost laughs but then she sees something in his face that makes her worry. She’s not quite got Turian expressions down to an exact science, but she’s getting there. She knows _him,_ at least.

“Oh. Hey, Shepard. How’d it go?”

“About as well as we expected,” she says with a shrug. She’s long since given up on the idea of things going _smoothly_. Probably best not to mention the airship, though. “Can we talk?”

He straightens up a bit, wrings his hands, realizes he’s doing it and then puts them behind his back. Almost funny. Almost. “Yeah,” he says. “I, uh—I actually wanted to talk to you too. About, um...this?”

“This?”

He moves one of his hands back and forth, pointing between the two of them. “ _This._ This, uh...”

Oh. “Yeah. Ok.”

She drops her shoes onto the floor and follows him down the railing to the end of the room, where they situate themselves on the floor, feet hanging over the edge and arms resting on the handrails in front of them. Shepard swings her feet, lets her toes brush the side of the Thanix.

He’s quiet for a while, and she’s wondering if maybe... well if maybe this is going to answer her questions before she even has to ask them, but then he coughs and she turns her face away to hide her smirk at his discomfort.

“Are your arms ok?”

When she turns back to him, she squints. “My... arms?” She looks down at herself, so uncovered in this dress, and bites her lip. The cybernetics scars are mostly gone, though there are a few remaining—a couple on her stomach, a few along her thighs, places Garrus hasn’t seen yet. But he is seeing her arms. And there are one or two still there, glowing bright and orange in the dark of the room. She covers one with her hand without thinking about it and the light shines through her fingers. A lump forms in her throat.

But Garrus isn’t looking at her; he’s looking at his hands, wringing them in his lap. “When I cut you,” he says. “I didn’t mean to, Shepard, really. You were just—you weren’t breathing and I was trying to wake you up.”

 _Oh._ Her hand falls away from her arm and she laughs and leans into him. “I’m fine,” she says. He puts his arm around her and draws her closer. “I did die, you know. I think I can handle a few scratches.” _I think I can handle anything._

“I was just worried that—I mean, we’re... We’re different,” he says. “And I thought maybe you’d be better off with something... a little closer to home.”

She doesn’t know how to tell him that he _is_ her home. It’s not just this—whatever this is between them. It’s the way he saw her on Omega—he _saw_ her. And it’s the way he forgot he couldn’t follow her into a Quarantine Zone. And it’s the way he was there after Pragia, right where she needed him to be, telling her _it’s ok_ in every way. She is home with him.

“I trust you, Garrus. More than anyone.”

And god knows they both need that here, surrounded by Cerberus and Collectors and a ship that is and isn’t the Normandy.

He rests his chin on the top of her head and she feels his chest move with his breath. “Yeah. Me too, Shepard.”

She was right after all: no need to even ask.

...

She was right. She was right. She was right.

Goddammit, she was right! So why does she feel like she just betrayed them all? Why does she feel like she led them all down the barrel of a loaded gun?

“Because you did,” she tells her reflection. The sharpie on her mirror is starting to fade away and she’d thought, when she was getting dressed for Kasumi’s heist, that maybe she ought to take a minute to draw the scars back on. She even thought—far more briefly—about using the marker to draw those old scars onto her body, instead of just her mirror. The dress had taken a while to adjust to, after so long hiding herself in fabric.

But she’d left them alone, decided that maybe she didn’t need them—at least not quite the way she’d first thought she did. And after Keiji, after Garrus, it had been ok. She had been ok.

_Because I was right._

_I’m Shepard._

But goddammit, would Shepard have done this? Take a team straight into a Collector ambush? Would Shepard have been that stupid?

“Yes,” she says aloud, still looking her reflection right in the eye. “She would’ve been because she was. _You_ were. _I_ was.”

She’s known from the start that Cerberus was dirty. No ship, no resurrection, and no amount of amicable crew members was ever going to make her trust The Illusive Man or the organization he stood for. Ever.

And yet she’d taken her team onto that ship and very nearly gotten them all killed under _his_ orders. She’s been parading around the galaxy (though reluctantly, to say the least) under _his_ banner. She knows she’s got no alternatives. She knows she’s got no resources. She knows she doesn’t owe Cerberus a goddamn thing.

But she always has a choice. And how do you decide between trying to save the fucking galaxy when the only way to do that is to sell your soul to a devil with the means? Which is the bigger sin? She’d thought it wasn’t a contest, that if this was the only way, then of course she had to take it, but...

“I’m Shepard,” she tells her reflection. It’s almost a chastisement, a scolding like her mother used to give her when she acted out.

“I’m Commander Shepard,” she says again. She was right. She _was right._ And it’s not just about Wrex or Garrus or Kaidan or Tali. It’s not about what Anderson says or what she felt inside Keiji’s graybox. It’s not about anybody but her. And she’s Shepard.

“I’m _Commander Fucking Shepard_.”

It turns out that punching a mirror is a tad bit stupider than punching a bathroom door.

\--- --- ---

Garrus starts to prop his feet up on the console but one dirty look from Joker’s got him settling right back into the co-pilot’s seat like a well-mannered Turian. And it occurs to him now that maybe he ought to make more of an effort to communicate his... appreciation for what Joker had said after he’d left the card game a couple weeks ago. But that’s for later, he decides. Right now, they’ve got a show. “Hey EDI? Are you actually allowed to let us hear this?”

Joker adjusts his cap and rolls his eyes. “Hey man, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Oh, I know that one,” Tali says, patting the top of Garrus’ seat.

“How the hell do you know that one?” He asks her, tipping his head back to look up at her.

“Shepard told me,” she says. “It means ‘don’t look for faults in a person when they are doing you a favour.’”

“Close enough,” Joker says, but Garrus has no idea what the hell that has to do with horses. He’s only even moderately certain of what a horse is.

“To answer your question, Garrus,” EDI says. “I felt that allowing key members of Shepard’s team to witness her reaction to the ambush might boost morale and rebuild trust in her leadership.”

He’ll admit the Collector ship was a shitstorm, but at no point has his trust in Shepard ever wavered. Of course, he’s not going to tell EDI that. He definitely wants to hear this.

“By ‘key members,’ she means ‘not Cerberus,’” Joker says. “And you can thank me for that inspired piece of advice.”

EDI starts the play-back of the comm. call, and they all roll their eyes for a few minutes while The Illusive Man justifies sending them into a death trap (or at least, he assumes Tali is also rolling her eyes). But then, after a very long pause which Garrus thinks may be a glitch or EDI skipping out on them, Shepard speaks.

“You fucking ball of slime. You dirty son-of-a-bitch, you almost got us killed. Where exactly, in the Bringing Shepard Back to Life Deal, did I agree to you fucking me over?”

“Perhaps you should consider the fact that you _did_ blow up one of our bases.”

Garrus doesn’t quite catch the next part, but Tali pats the back of his seat excitedly. “I taught her that one!”

“That’s a Quarian expression?”

She laughs. “Nothing you’d say to your mother.”

And sure, the rest of the call is pretty interesting stuff—Reaper Code and mission specs and things—but the real reason he’s hanging on to the edge of his seat is Shepard’s constant (and adorably, weirdly human) expressions of oncoming vengeance. It’s not every day you get to hear someone threaten to launch an entire base into the sun.

But then EDI stops the play-back (halfway through “you shit-eating son of—”) and says “Garrus, I believe your assistance would be appreciated in the Medical Bay.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Shepard has... injured herself.”

...

She doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed of herself and he’s really not sure if her dumb grin makes him want to smack her or wrap his arms around her. She looks far too comfortable—smug even—sitting there on the med-bed with her hand wrapped in gauze (and the little bit of blood seeping through the bandage is not making him feel better, despite his calm demeanour).

“You broke your mirror?”

“Yes.”

“On purpose?”

“Well... mostly, yeah.”

He presses his thumb into the bridge of his nose before he takes a deep breath and sits down next to her. “You gonna explain to me _why_ you did this?”

She leans against him and hums happily and he thinks she’s far too calm about all this but he’s definitely not about to push her away. “Didn’t need it anymore.”

“The mirror?”

“Yeah.”

 _Ok..._ “And your hand?”

She shrugs and lays back on the little bed and pulls him down beside her. “Yeah, Doc said it’ll probably scar.”

He stares up at the ceiling, follows the lines of the metal plates and ventilation system, and lets his fingers run through her hair. His years of C-Sec interrogation training are going to waste, obviously, when he can’t even seem to get a straight answer out of her.

“I think I’ll like it,” she says. He’s about to ask her what the hell she’s talking about but she goes on, tracing her fingers along the lines of his shirt as she talks. “I think that five years from now, I’m gonna look at my hand and be glad to have a scar like this.”

That gets his attention—not the scar, the other thing, the thing where she survives this, where she sounds so sure it’s all gonna work out. Pretty far off from where she was that day down in the Battery. “Planning that far ahead, huh?”

He feels her nod against his shoulder.

And you know what? Why the hell not? “Think you can work me into your schedule?”

She wriggles out of his grasp and turns over onto her side, throws her arm around his waist and presses her lips against the side of his face. Human lips. Damnedest things.

“I’m sure I can move a few things around for you,” she says.

\--- --- ---

Just a test of mettle.

Her father used to say that, usually on the rare occasion he couldn’t find something—anything—to be optimistic about: “It’s just a test of mettle, sweetheart.”

Took her years to figure out that “mettle” wasn’t “metal” and that it had nothing to do with fixing tractors and such. And by then, she’d proven her mettle and/or metal several times over.

She takes a deep breath. No gravity. So this is just going to be one of those times. Testing the mettle in her heart and the metal in her mag boots.

“Shepard Commander, are you having difficulties?”

She takes a step toward Legion— _breathe, breathe, breathe_ —and forces a smile onto her face. “Legion, I’ve been having difficulties since 2170.”

“We understand this was the year—”

“It was a joke, Legion.” A poor one, but considering that the alternative is throwing up in her helmet, it’ll have to do. “It’s an organic thing; you’ll get used to it.”

She takes a few more steps. There are apparently no windows on Geth stations and at the moment, that’s just fine by her. Nowhere for her to go if she falls, no way for her to—

No. Breathe. _You’re an Alliance soldier. N7. Space Explorer. Spectre. Commander Fucking Shepard._

But moving forward is so very hard.

Her radio crackles—private line.

“Shepard?” Garrus. “Are you ok?”

“Yeah,” she says, a bit breathless. “Just... adjusting.”

“Shepard.”

She turns her head to look back at him over her shoulder and he nods.

“I’m right here, Shepard.”

And he is. He always is. Shepard and Vakarian testing their mettle.

She nods back and takes a long look down the hallway. Not so far.

“If you want,” he says. “I can start blasting Die for the Cause through your headset.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

She takes another step.

\--- --- ---

So then this is it.

He’d known it was coming. Hell, they all have. But it still feels too soon.

A couple hours from now, they’re gonna hit Omega 4, and that’s it, one way or another.

Garrus watches her when she gives the order. He leans against the threshold of the cockpit and watches her put her hand on Joker’s shoulder and he doesn’t know how it happened that the galaxy got so lucky—that a woman like Shepard is here, in the “right” place at the “right” time and has the means and the guts to jump to what might be her death at FTL.

She doesn’t even hesitate. Her voice doesn’t waver and her hands don’t shake and you wouldn’t think she’s spent the last several months sleepless and hounded by all the things that have tried to tear her down—killers and sickness and doubt and old friends.

She thinks they’re going to make it. She does. And he knows that she’s going to do whatever it takes to get them back. And he’s going to be there right beside her, exactly where he’s supposed to be.

And later, when she’s tangled around him and his fingers are wound in her hair, and she tells him again that they’re gonna make it, he believes her.

Because fuck if it’s taken him this long to realize that he just might love her, that he just might be closer to home with her than he is anywhere else in the galaxy. And fuck if this is going to be the last night he spends lying in her bed, the last time he drags his hands along her skin, the last time he presses his nose into the crook of her neck and whispers her name while she finally— _finally_ —rests.

He lost her once, right over Alchera. There’d been no goodbye, no time to say _I’ll miss you, I need you, I love you._ It’d been a dirty joke sent to his omni-tool, a good laugh one day, and then her name on the news vids the next. Months of people telling him over and over and over that Shepard— _his_ Shepard, even then—was gone.

He’s not gonna say it now.

_Goodbye, just in case. You’re beautiful. You’re brave. You’re my best friend and I think I might love you._

He’s not gonna say it. Last time he didn’t get the chance and this time he’s not taking it.

All this time and nothing’s gonna take her now.


End file.
